The Midnight House

happened.

“To who,” Terreri said. “Whitby? Sanchez? You think they care?”

“He’s permanently disabled.”

“He’s got a limp.”

“He can’t walk.”

“One of those bombs of his had blown up in his face, he’d be disabled.”

“Colonel—”

“Major, I have heard your advice, and I will consider it. Anything else?”

“No, sir.” Callar didn’t argue further. But her attitude changed. Twice since then, she’d interfered during interrogations, made Karp and Fisher pull detainees out of the punishment box. The squad had to have a doctor, so Terreri couldn’t dismiss her. But she was yet another reason this deployment couldn’t end soon enough.

NOW SHE WALKED into the interrogation room, sat across from Terreri. “Colonel.”

“Major.”

“You seem tired.”

“So do you.” Tired, and getting old like a local. She seemed to have aged a decade in the last year. And lost about fifteen pounds. She wasn’t bad-looking, but her skin was tight on her face and her arms painfully thin.

“Why were you laughing just now, Colonel?”

He considered blowing off the question. Then decided, might as well tell her.

“Jawaruddin was in that chair just now. Playing tough. I was thinking what we’re going to do to him, and it seemed funny.”

“Why did it seem funny?”

“Figuring out how to break guys without leaving a mark. It’s a strange way to spend your life.”

“Are you uncomfortable with the idea of hurting him?”

“Are you?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“The answer is no. I’m plain sick of these guys. That’s all.”

“Do you think you’ve lost the ability to empathize with them? Does that bother you?”

For the second time in five minutes, Terreri found himself laughing. She didn’t say anything. He laughed as long as he could. Then his laughter petered out and they stared at each other in silence.

“That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“Why?”

“You really are a shrink. I say you’re stupid, and you say why. I don’t want to empathize with them. I want to break them. If you can’t handle it, you let me know.”

“We both want the same thing, Colonel. But I see disturbing tendencies in some of the interrogators. Even in you. I’m worried about depersonalization.”

Terreri felt his stomach tighten, rage bubble up. This woman, this reservist with some fancy letters behind her name, telling him what to do.

“Three months left and we’re done. I don’t need this crap right now, Major.”

“Sir. Three months is a significant length of time. I am responsible for monitoring the mental health of the members of this squad. As well as the physical health of the detainees.”

“That speech you gave me when you signed up, that private you didn’t save. Guy who decided to find out how a bullet tasted.”

“Travis.”

“Travis. That was his name. Now, Travis, he got depersonalized. He depersonalized himself with a.45. And I warned you it wasn’t going to be easy, but you signed for it, and now we’re almost through. Jawaruddin bin Zari, we caught him with a truck bomb. His buddy Mohammed put a bullet in one of our guys. Your job is to help us get these men to talk. You understand that?”

She didn’t say a word. Just nodded. Good. Terreri had enough to worry about. They were going to go hard at bin Zari, and she was going to have to be involved. Whether she wanted to be or not.

“Thank you for your concern, Major. You are dismissed.”

14

NEW ORLEANS

Noemie Williams and her sons lived in a two-story house in Gentilly, the northeast corner of New Orleans, near Lake Pontchartrain. During Katrina, levees had failed on both sides of the neighborhood. The floodwaters had topped ten feet.

Even now, even at night, the scars from the storm were obvious. The house beside Noemie’s was vacant, plywood over its windows, a jagged crack slicing through the bricks on its front-right corner. A lot one block down was simply empty, no sign that a home had ever existed on it. On another, only a poured concrete foundation remained. Traffic was sparse and pedestrians nonexistent, though a few blocks south, toward the Ninth Ward, an open-air drug market was in full swing. The neighborhood made Wells think of a proud old man who’d had a heart attack and hadn’t decided yet whether to try to rehab or lie back and let nature take its course.

Noemie Williams was fighting, though. Her house had a fresh coat of white paint and what looked like a new porch, complete with a rocking horse painted red, black, and green. She had asked Wells to come at 10 p.m., saying she needed to put her sons to bed. He gave her a little extra time, knocked on her door at 10:15. She slid the dead bolt back immediately, and he realized too late that when Williams said ten, she meant ten.

The door pulled just an inch, a soft creak, chain still on the hook. Wells flipped open his wallet, showed her his identification.

“May I?” she said. Wells handed it through the crack in the door. She glanced at it, handed it back, opened up. She was tall and light-skinned, cornrows tight across her skull. She wore cropped black pants and a black T- shirt with “Forever New Orleans” stenciled in gold on the chest. The lines on her forehead said she was at least forty, though she had the legs of a woman a decade younger.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Sit.” She nodded to the living-room couch, protected by a plastic cover. In the reports of their interviews with her, the FBI agents wrote that Noemie Williams had been “calm and composed.” Wells agreed already.

“Get you anything?” Noemie said. She had the marbles-in-mouth south Louisiana accent: half Birmingham, one-third Boston, one-sixth Bugs Bunny.

“I’m fine.”

“Chicory coffee? Local specialty. Along with po’boys and heart attacks. Got a pot brewing.” Indeed, the sweet smell of chicory filled the house.

“If you’re having some, sure.”

Noemie disappeared, leaving Wells to examine the room, which was decorated — to a fault — in the motif of proud African American. On one wall, posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali shared space with family pictures. Another wall was given over to a framed poster of Barack Obama standing in front of the White House.

Noemie carried in a tray, two steaming mugs of coffee and a jug of milk, along with a plateful of cookies. “Come to Louisiana, you will get fed,” she said. The cookies were lemon and sugar and cinnamon, and fell into buttery pieces in Wells’s mouth. He had to make a conscious effort to stop after three of them. The coffee had a bite that pulled Wells back to Pakistan, tiny cups of sweet, strong coffee brewed in battered metal pots, half sugar and half crunchy grounds, the only antidote to the chill of winter in the North-West Frontier.

“So, you knew my husband.”

The past tense jumped at Wells. Jerry Williams was missing, not dead. Officially, anyway.